Abstract
This paper will examine the nature of the modern day American fraternity system. In three parts, this paper will discuss what defines membership in a fraternity, what actions are challenging, and what actions are reinforcing hegemonic masculinity. We conduct this discussion through a study of initiation rituals, otherwise known as “hazing” rituals, as well as coercive, heteronormative sexual practices. The hazing rituals used for initiation expose the transgression of hegemonic ideals in fraternity behavior. Conversely, the sexual ideology inscribed in the fraternity rituals of sexual coercion both naturalizes and reifies the sexual aggression and dominance endemic to hegemonic masculinity. These aspects of fraternity culture collectively paint a portrait of modern manhood as a fragmented, contested arena in which bodies are at once strictly bound within the established borders of corporeal legibility and challenged to step outside of the rigidity of these boundaries.
Introduction
Almost about every college campus in the United States partakes in the college Greek system. Students who want to participate in Greek life either join a ‘fraternity,’ which is male-only, or a ‘sorority,’ which is female-only. While these fraternities and sororities initially started out as a means for philanthropic work and unity amongst a collective group of students, they have slowly started becoming more and more violent and oppressive. Specifically, fraternities (or the all-male greek groups) are known for their challenges, critiques, and responses to hegemonic ideas of masculinity. By taking a closer look at the image and role of fraternities on college campuses, it becomes clear that something deeper is happening: power relations are becoming unbalanced and questioned. Research for this paper has been drawn from published academic literature and articles found online. The word “fraternity” comes from the latin word ‘frater’ meaning brother. However, members of the same fraternity are often seen as more than just brothers -- they are family. In the anthropological sense of the word, fraternity brothers form a ‘kinship’ where everyone looks out for each others’ own best interest. Ideally a fraternity is a place where men can be surrounded by like-minded people who support similar values and goals in life and college. In Wilson McWilliams’s book, The Idea of Fraternity in America, he explains that kinship “introduces men to hierarchy, authority, and command” (Williams 1). Since children often look up to their parents for examples of how to act, the job of finding a “new family” in college becomes crucial. And that is precisely where fraternities come into play. Their initial formation was also about finding people who already understood what it meant to “be a man” and how to embody an acceptable kind of masculinity, but that has started changing. Nowadays, fraternities are known for their intense -- often highly violent -- means of establishing a community and organization. But at what expense? The Greek system is a general term used to refer to both fraternities and sororities on college campuses. It is called a “Greek system” because each house uses letters from the greek alphabet to form its name, and each house is part of a larger national organization. Not all colleges have the same fraternities and/or sororities, and even the politics of one house can vary from campus to campus; the actions of the students in their respective houses is college-campus specific. Generally speaking, students who are trying to join a house are called ‘pledges’, and the process of figuring out what group to join is called “rush” or “recruitment.” Since this paper will focus on the behavior of men in American fraternities, it is important to note some founding principles for the establishment of the first fraternity in the states. According to the greek life homepage of Appalachian State University, “students began forming their own groups to debate and discuss current events and literature” (Appalachian State University website). In this way, students who joined were able to have an outlet for discussions and conversations outside of the classroom; it became a place that furthered learning aside from professors in academic classes. The Appalachian State University places a heavy emphasis on the importance of tradition in the creation of the first fraternity, Phi Beta Kappa in 1776. Once men joined a fraternity, it was hard to back out of the responsibilities that are endemic to membership of that organization. As time went on, the groups became more and more selective and exclusive -- almost to the point of being gang-like. Most fraternities were started by men when the only word available was fraternity. Later sororities were added when the Latin word ‘soror’ meaning sister was taken into account. Perhaps one of the most popular college campuses for Greek like is Depauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. Multiple major fraternities were established there, and today nearly seventy percent of students on campus are members of greek life (Depauw Greek Life Website). Interestingly enough, in a public pdf document with frequently asked questions, the university explains only positive aspects of joining greek life: “greek-letter organizations were founded on the principles of leadership, service, scholarship and brother/sisterhood. Students today find that fraternity and sorority life provides opportunities to get involved within the community and on campus, develop lifelong friendships, gain valuable leadership experience and achieve success academically” (Depauw website). It seems like greek life -- specifically fraternities -- have it all: they foster academic growth and are a tight community where men can comfortably bond. Except this is not always the case. Instead of creating men who live up to an ideal sense of masculinity, there are multiple cases of disrespect and outright rejection of non-dominant portraits of masculinity. Dominant ideas of masculinity are being readily challenged in today’s American colleges and universities. First, this paper will examine the practice of hazing amongst new pledges. “Hazing” is a practice that has -- unfortunately -- become a common practice for new students wanting to enter a fraternity. They are often made to do obnoxious, gross, and unsafe practices to “prove” their worth and commitment to a certain greek house. In theory it serves as a kind of ‘bonding experience’ in the sense that there is a shared understanding of trauma that strengthens the community, but instead it often uses the body problematically as a means for overcoming marginalized masculinity. Some schools have employed anti-hazing bans, but the practice is still rampant on college campuses today. It is a way of transgressing the hegemonic ideal through homoeroticism, but the boundary between homosocial and homoerotic environments is not so clear cut. Instead, hazing becomes a performative element of proving one’s identity. Likewise, a second instance this paper will focus on is the behavior of men once they have been accepted into a fraternity. How do they treat women? What is their relationship to hegemonic ideals of masculinity and what role does date rape play in dealing with these issues?
Homosexual Hazing
Scott Fabius Kiesling states, “Fraternities provide a legitimised structure within which the men can socialize with other men, without fear of attracting a homosexual label. This legitimization of male friendships is an important aspect of the fraternity. The fraternity’s interactional spaces allow the men to ‘safely’ express their connections with one another through ‘approved’ channels” (Kiesling 6). American frat culture is a strong symbol of male solidarity and bonding, it allows men to spend more time with each other in bigger groups without a fear of being seen as gay. Although the image of American frat culture is in line with hegemonic and heteronormative ideals of masculinity, there is a lot of behavior associated with hazing and male bonding that transgresses these boundaries of hegemonic masculinity. Behind the façade of the hyper-masculine and hegemonic frat identity lies the true reasoning behind men’s desire to join a fraternity; most men’s desire stem from wanting close friendships with men, unconditional acceptance, protection, and to have a place where one can do things that one would not normally do (Kiesling 13). But before men can get to the actual male bonding and friendship of fraternity life, they must go through the hazing process, which decides what men are worthy of being a part of that particular fraternity. In their research on fraternity cultures, Martin and Hummer (1989) found that: Fraternities emphasize ‘…toughness, withstanding pain and humiliation, obedience to superiors, and using physical force to obtain compliance’. In support of hazing, men will often say that such ‘traditions’ are necessary to ‘weed out’ those unworthy of membership. Some men who have been hazed are firm believers in the process of hazing and insist that they enjoyed the challenge’. Such arguments are firmly embedded in cultural expectations around masculinity and what we are taught to expect of ‘real men’ (Allen 1). In order to gain access to the homosocial environment and male bonding aspects of fraternities, hazing is used to prove one’s masculinity and manhood through hegemonic and hyper-masculine ideals. Peggy Reeves Sanday states: “The ritual inducts pledges into the brotherhood by first producing and then resolving anxiety about masculinity. The ritual produces anxiety by representing the feminine to the pledge as both dirty and as part of his subjectivity. The ritual then resolves the anxiety by cleansing the pledge of his supposed feminine identification and promising him a lifelong position in a purified male social order” (Sanday 1). The different practices of hazing can be demeaning, humiliating, emasculating, feminizing, and dangerous, but it is this idea -- that of breaking a man down to his weakest point and seeing if he succeeds in getting past it -- that proves he is a ‘real man’. Hazing practices have been a long standing tradition for men to get initiated into a fraternity, but in the past few years, more and more people have been condemning hazing due to its homophobic, violent, dangerous, and even lethal nature. An example of a popular hazing ritual is the “elephant walk,” in which pledges have to drink an excessive amount of warm beer and then get naked and form a line. Each person then has to put their thumb in the anus of the male in front of him, and hold the penis of the male behind him, and then walk around (Simpson 1). Other popular hazing rituals include paddling, jerk off contests, drinking alcohol out of a man’s buttocks, anal penetration with various objects, and eating a cookie with sperm on it known as a jizz cookie. The hazing rituals then become about violating one’s own male body, or another person’s body often in a sexual way using the penis, balls or the buttocks. In hazing and fraternity culture, there exists a contradiction: on one hand fraternities are hegemonic and heteronormative (though a rejection of femininity and homosexuality), but on the other hand, hazing rituals also enact homoerotic and homosexual behavior. It is possible that bonding behaviors in heterosexual, male-dominated groups are in fact homosexual, but in a disavowed or repressed way; the hazing rituals allow this repression to be expressed but in a minimal way without leading to homosexuality. It makes one wonder the reasoning of why men would subject themselves to being completely dominated, violated and emasculated in order to be a part of what fraternity culture sees as a privileged and select group of men, when men could become friends with other men without all these obstacles. Freud states: “All-male groups are bound together by barely sublimated homoerotic feelings” (Simpson 1). Whenever men are naked around each other or touching each other, even when they do so in a non-sexual way, there are often immediate connections to homoeroticism or homosexuality: there could be an underlying homoerotic tension among all men that only comes out in certain situations. Yeung, Stombler, and Wharton believe “Even when homoerotic rituals are prevalent in some fraternities, they are merely tools to humiliate pledges and reinforce brothers’ heterosexuality, serving as a rite of passage to ‘real’ manhood” (Yeung, Strombler, and Wharton 7). The belief is that these homoerotic rituals are used to reinforce hegemonic masculine ideals. The rituals are with the intention to produce men who are not women and not feminine, and to enforce a particular negative ideology of homosexuality and femininity (Ibid 7). Whether there actually is homoerotic intention within these hazing rituals or not, it can be said that much of the fraternity culture behavior and hazing process is due to a fear and threat of homosexuality. Fraternity culture often chooses to parody femininity or homosexual behavior as a way to laugh at and diffuse the threat of homosexuality in all-male groups; however, in hazing rituals and male bonding there tends to be a thin line that exists between homoerotic and homosexual. It seems that the disavowal of homoeroticism within fraternity brothers’ interactions, and the belief that these hazing rituals turn a fraternity brother into a “real man” keep these lines from getting crossed. The hazing rituals in American fraternity culture are an important contributing factor to hegemonic masculinity, and yet, in the process of proving who “real men” are, hazing rituals also undermine hegemonic masculinity.
Heteronormative Practices
The rising incidence of acquaintance rapes across college and university campuses in the United States provides a perspective on the concept of a ‘rape culture’ as it exists in and is perpetuated through the American fraternity system. This collegiate context is arguably where budding social scripts for sexual practices and norms, as well as aberrations from this norm, are developed and refined on the individual level and further perpetuated on a wider, cultural level. In a pioneering study conducted in 1957, Kirkpatrick and Kanin found that 56% of the 291 college women surveyed reported experiencing coerced sexual activity, with 21% reporting “forceful attempts at sexual intercourse” (Kirkpatrick & Kanin, 1957). In alignment with these findings, Adams-Curtis and Forbes estimate that 20% of university women will experience rape or attempted by the end of their college careers (Adams-Curtis & Forbes, 2004). These findings reveal that the experience of rape on university and college campuses extends beyond isolated incidents and are indicative of social trends. This trend can be attributed to a widespread reproduction of hegemonic masculine identity by developing masculinities in adherence with the cultural sexual norms. The campus party culture and fraternal institutions, encompassing all exclusionary male-organizational bodies, collectively form sites of the performance of dominant male ideologies, whereby male sexuality is negotiated through the enacting and exaggeration of expected sex roles. In her cross-university examination of fraternities, cultural anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday found that coparticipation in rape by fraternity pledges and members, or brothers, served as the seat of transmission for social ideologies of sexual entitlement (Sanday, 1990). Within the sexual discourse of the fraternities, the systematic sexual devaluation of women, through gang rape, is framed as sport and routinized as par for the course of initiation into the fraternity. Camaraderie and social bonds among the pledges and brothers are established early through regular social gatherings and provision of alcohol on part of the older brothers, and entry into the fraternity is characterized to pledges as a privilege and as an indication of elevated social status (Sanday, 1990). In one instance, Sanday describes the various “riffing,” or persuasion, techniques employed by the brothers, including smooth-talking, guilting and giving alcohol, to engage in sexual intercourse with otherwise unwilling women as part of a “house status game,” in which brothers determined winners and losers of the game based upon the final tallied number of sexual contacts accrued by each brother. The sexual ideology inscribed in the fraternity rituals of sexual coercion is rooted in the beliefs of naturalized male privilege and legitimizes hegemonic male dominance in its assumption that sexual dominance and exploitation is not only natural but, indeed, conditional for masculinity (Sanday, 1990). Sanday’s findings serve as a microcosmic representation of the wider cultural values at play. The binary construction of gender and sexual identities that characterizes the West reduces the panoply of existing human sexualities and sexual expressions into two generalized forms of masculine and feminine. Masculinity and manhood, within this model, are conflated with strength and power and further understood to be a rejection of all that is feminine, or weak, including such marginal masculinities as homosexuality. As such, hypermasculinity, characterized by exaggeratedly aggressive sexual expression and homophobia, becomes a device deployed to conform to and assert this framing of manhood in face of its internalization as a desired identity and in face of the fear of judgment by others who subscribe to the same set of cultural values. In the words of scholar Michael Kimmel, “sexual beings are made, not born” (Kimmel, 2005). In an application of the feminist discourse of understanding rape, the examination of fraternity men showcases the ways in which developing male subjectivities are incorporated into the wider sexual ethos of the culture. In the same vein, A. Ayres Boswell and Joan Spade’s study (1996) of differential risks associated with fraternities as locations for social gatherings identify the social and environmental contexts that link fraternities with the promotion of a collegiate rape culture and with the rising rates of campus acquaintance rapes. The study involved sending student-observers to social gatherings at “high-risk” and “low-risk” fraternity houses to assess for perceived sexual risk and danger through exhibition of stereotyped and devaluating gender interactions. Boswell and Spade conclude that rape is not simply a product of individual proclivities and behavior rather it must be implicated within a larger web of the social and environmental reinforcements (Boswell & Spade, 1996). The study’s central operating concept of a collegiate rape culture represents the marriage of the notion of cultural beliefs and values leading to a rape-conducive “rape culture” with Sanday’s identification of fraternities as exclusionary male sites wherein dichotomous gender roles are produced and reproduced. Boswell and Spade’s findings of differential perceptions of danger between fraternity houses and non-fraternity institutions as well as among different fraternity houses suggest that cultural forces involved in promoting and facilitating sexual coercion are neither immutable nor uniform in its effects. Only fraternities that are most sexually exclusionary and adhere most stringently to traditional sex roles are classified as “high-risk” houses. These results indicate that only certain types of cultural value subscription render subscribers more prone to uphold traditional masculinity and aggressive sexual expression. This opens the dialogue for the potential for the reform of on the individual level through effecting changes in value-identification and through peer-directed programs.
Conclusion
In conclusion, watching the changing nature of fraternity culture reveals much about the landscape of American masculinity. What started as an outlet for students to continue an academic discussion outside the classroom has been transformed into a social place of policing masculinity. In particular, this paper has discussed the often dangerous and homoerotic process of hazing as men are inducted into a new house. Additionally, this paper has also touched upon policing done by brothers in fraternities after initiation via sexual coercion in cases such as date rape. The acceptance of marginalized masculinities has been policed by men identifying within the dominate hegemonic masculinity. Men belonging to a fraternity live at the contested border and boundary between acceptance and rejection.
Works Cited
Adams-Curtis, Leah E., and Gordon Forbes. "Sexual Coercion on College Campuses." Trauma, Violence, and Abuse 5.91 (2004). Print.
Allan, Elizabeth J. "Hazing and Gender: Analyzing the Obvious." Stophazing.org. Stop Hazing, 2005. Web. 9 Dec. 2012.
Boswell, A. A., and J. Z. Spade. "Fraternities and Collegiate Rape Culture: Why Are Some Fraternities More Dangerous Places for Women?" Gender & Society 10.2 (1996): 133-47. Print. "Fraternity and Sorority Life." Appalachian State University, Web. Dec. 2012.